Are the 2ea Titans really that significant a boost for running resolve.

Usage - currently mostly 1080p 4-10 min corporate video and advertising but originating from 2k BM Cinema Cam raw DNG; but occasionally getting 4k material. Within 1 to 2 yrs will be moving to Ursa 4.6 acquisition and who knows the final deliverable required within a couple years - more future proofing. External raid of course.Dwaine Maggart are you around - really would appreciate your knowledgeable input as I imagine many others are. Thank you all in advance.

We are moving from a MacPro 3,1 March 2008 that was a beast for the time and served us very well for almost 9 years. Admittedly we hung on waaaaaaaay too long and probably lost economic sense a couple years back.

But definitely want to start off with a strong config again - just want to make sure about the motherboard/processor being the best current choice.

Corei7-6950X, specially overclocked to e.g. 4GHz with some GTX 1080s is good compromise in my opinion.There were some reports about speed difference between latest GPUs, so check it and decide if worth the money. Sometimes a lot of money needs to be added to get just 10% more speed. It all depends if you can finance investment, if you have constant amount of projects.

I would say it depends a lot on you work flow. If you work with a lot of short clips, and transcoding with something like ffmpeg, then more cores is better than fewer high frequency ones, because you can transcode in parallel. If you work with long clips, fewer high frequency cores seem better.

Once in DR, the GPU is the most important thing. I was working with 4k60 DNxHR HQ footage last night, and I was limited by my 1070, not my 6850k.

If you get a new machine now, you will be future proofed for a little while. Intel isn't expecting 10nm architecture till late 2018 (won't be a significant step forward), and 7nm won't be out till 2021.

As promised, here are the "Candle Test" benchmark results from our workstation replacement for our aging 2008 MacPro 3,1 Dual Xeon. As suspected, I was a total fool to have waited so long and cost us dearly in lost hours as well as limited our creativity due to budget time constraints. As many here advised, consider the cost of your labor when weighing monetary outlays for updated hardware.

The "Candle Test" seems to be the only widespread user disseminated benchmark available that I could find. This test is admittedly canted to test the GPU power of a system and since Resolve is constructed to make heavy use of the GPU, this benchmark is of value.

But as many here have pointed out in the discussions of topics such as Dual Xeons vs Single Faster CPU's, it's extremely important to consider the type and project size. And this Candle Test benchmark won't reveal needs for those considerations. The fine folks at BM are obviously the best resource for workstation configurations and have recently commented here that they are updating their much needed guide. Many here would urge them to consider configuration guidance based upon project size/type. The needs of 30 second spots are entirely different from those of feature length projects. PCIe slots needed for voluminous terabytes of storage in addition to multiple GPU's dictate an entirely different configuration from a short project producer who would benefit more from faster current CPU's instead of added PCIe slots.

Went with ECC Registered Memory because both workstation builders recommended it for better reliability over non-ECC memory.Here is a quote from Puget Systems website regarding ECC vs non-ECC:"At the cost of a little money and performance, ECC RAM is many times more reliable than non-ECC RAM. And when high-value data is involved, that increase in reliability is almost always going to be worth the small monetary and performance costs. In fact, anytime it is possible to do so, we would recommend using ECC RAM."Since both the video workstation builders I trust were recommending the same ECC memory I went with it.

As for the memory speed, I keep reading that there is almost negligible gain between the speeds discussed here. Since a system memory failure could really be a costly failure, I stuck with most reliable memory.

As for the overall Candle Test results, from what I have seen, this workstation is in-line with similar machines. What are you thinking/seeing should be the FPS of the Candle Test?

And I will be the very first to admit to not being at any high level of workstation building and thus going with builders with a good reputations (ADK and Puget). They both were very close in their recommended configurations for our mostly 1080HD short commercial/corporate work with an eye to 4k soon.

I've only personally experienced a ram stick failure 2 times ... once on a Sharp laptop and another maybe 13 years ago on a Standard Def Canopus Storm editing machine built by a company named DVLine. Wow that is some ancient history. How far we've come on what these beasts can do! That was a total disaster and cost me a lot of time. But on all the other workstations, biz computers and laptops, and the Apple MacPro3,1 no ram or hard drive failures including raids. Loved that Mac/Dulce external 8 drive raid - still works fine just too slow to keep up with today's software.

My thoughts are towards the cost of labor ... if it only costs a little to ensure any reliability against a high labor cost or, heaven forbid - lost footage, it's a no brainer IMO.

We shoot on BM Cinema Camera either Raw2k or ProRes/DNX, Pocket Cam, Canon XLH1-Convergent Design XDR or XHG1 Flash Drive, Canon 7D. So we haven't dealt with the codec you asked about.

As for the level of satisfaction with this machine ... no comparison - pure joy.One quick example: power windows - if the subject required tracking heavy movement, I had to weigh the time/value against budget constraints. The way this thing tracks power windows is blazing fast. Couldn't believe what I was seeing... a "that just can't be!" moment.

The ECC RAM would have been worth it if you had a Xeon CPU on the X99 motherboard, but the Broadwell-E CPU's support ECC RAM in Non ECC mode, so they don't use the ECC side of them.

As to failures, been a system builder for over 16 years and only ever had to send around 14 sticks of RAM back for failure in that whole time, and most of those were DOA so never got as far as going out to customers.

Personally I would steer clear of that motherboard. It uses Plex chips to allow that many slots to go through the physical 40 bus lanes you get on the CPU and plex chips have been known to cause issues with BM cards. Go for a board that only allows for the actual physical lanes such as the Gigabyte X99P-SLI which also has TB 3 built in